Editorial: Vacaville residents must speak up about school safety

The December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., sent a chill through school officials everywhere. The school had a top-notch safety program in place, yet 20 first-graders and six adults lay dead.

The school had security cameras and a single entry point. During school hours, visitors had to be identified before they were buzzed through the gate. Teachers, staff and students regularly drilled, as did police and fire personnel from Newtown. None of it kept a lone gunman from shooting his way onto campus.

Could it happen here? What can or should we do to prevent it? Such questions are being asked in communities across the nation.

This week, schools in the Vacaville Unified School District begin asking staff, students, parents and community members for their thoughts about safety on a school-by-school basis. The goal is for each of the district's 15 campuses to gather input and pass it on to the district office in about two weeks. There, the information will be compiled and presented to the school board.

Make no mistake, Vacaville Unified already has a safety plan and schools regularly conduct fire, earthquake and intruder drills. But is it enough? And if more should be done, how much more?

As Board President David McCallum observed during a thoughtful discussion at the trustees' Jan. 17 meeting, Vacaville has long been considered a "safe" community and its schools have remained relatively open, available and welcoming to all. "That's something to be admired, but it has its downsides and potential dangers. To react and mitigate those things for the sake of security, you are losing something. Are you gaining enough?"

It gets down to a fundamental question: What kind of community do we want to be?

Vacaville's culture of openness has made its schools popular neighborhood hubs, before, during and after school. Parents and residents who are made to feel welcome at school become more engaged in the education process. If schools are closed down too tightly, they risk losing that community involvement.

In the past, the desire to make schools an integral part of the community led to designing some of them to share space with neighboring city parks. Certainly, it is a benefit to residents to have access to that extra recreational space in the evenings and weekends.

Yet that same access can be a worry during school hours. Parents from Brown's Valley Elementary School told the school board as much when they presented a petition asking for a fence. Among the concerns are that parents using the park sometimes bring their toddlers to the school's restrooms during school hours or interact with their own children at recess.

"It's appalling how open and free this campus is," one parent, a relatively new resident, told the board.

And yet, there is safety in that very openness. Caring parents at the park during the school day can provide extra eyes and ears to watch out for those who might be intent on doing harm or mischief. Vacaville has a culture of that sort of engagement. Just ask the numerous crooks who've been caught because neighbors saw something suspicious and reported it.

There are other tradeoffs to consider, too. For instance, it is extremely rare for armed strangers to come barreling onto school campuses with guns blazing. It's more likely that a school shooting will involve students themselves -- and even those cases are infrequent. Anti-bullying programs and more school counselors to deal with the causes behind such incidents may be more cost-effective than metal detectors.

Speaking of cost, how much are taxpayers willing to spend? As Superintendent John Niederkorn pointed out, California law stipulates that only sworn law enforcement officers are allowed to carry firearms on a school campus. In the unlikely event that the school district decided to operate its own police force, it could expect to spend twice as much on officer salaries as it does for teachers.

Even simple measures such as locking classroom doors can have a downside when it comes to school safety. If it's a windowless door, then no one can see into the classroom, either. That can put children in danger of being abused by their own teachers. That's rare, too, but it also happens.

Ideally, classroom doors would have windows -- but how many are bulletproof? And how effective are any of these protections if students are the ones sent to answer the door when a knock comes?

"Let's not kid ourselves," Superintendent Niederkorn told trustees, "There are some things that we do that actually make us safer; there are some things we do that make us feel safer. They are two different things."

In coming weeks, parents, teachers, staff and community members should accept their school's invitation to discuss campus safety.

The more input the school board gets, the better it will be able to implement policies that actually improve safety.

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Here is a list of some of Vacaville Unified's upcoming school safety meetings: